Assessing the Security of GitHub Copilot's Generated Code - A Targeted Replication Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AI-powered code generation models have been developing rapidly, allowing developers to expedite code generation and thus improve their productivity. These models are trained on large corpora of code (primarily sourced from public repositories), which may contain bugs and vulnerabilities. Several concerns have been raised about the security of the code generated by these models. Recent studies have investigated security issues in AI-powered code generation tools such as GitHub Copilot and Amazon Code Whisperer, revealing several security weaknesses in the code generated by these tools. As these tools evolve, it is expected that they will improve their security protocols to prevent the suggestion of insecure code to developers. This paper replicates the study of Pearce et al., which investigated security weaknesses in Copilot and uncovered several weaknesses in the code suggested by Copilot across diverse scenarios and languages (Python, C, and Verilog). Our replication examines Copilot's security weaknesses using newer versions of Copilot and CodeQL (the security analysis framework). The replication focused on the presence of security vulnerabilities in Python code. Our results indicate that, with the improvements in newer versions of Copilot, the percentage of vulnerable code suggestions has reduced from 36.54% to 27.25%. Nonetheless, it remains evident that the model still suggests insecure code.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.084 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".